Berkeley Talks

As of 2017, there were more than 273 million smartphones in use in the country and 5 billion subscriber connections worldwide.“This is a big, big business,” says Joel Moskowitz, the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health at the School of Public Health. “This is an industry that’s probably been unparalleled by any other industry in the world, in terms of reach.”Moskowitz gave a talk last spring called “Cell Phones, Cell Towers and Wireless Safety” for Be Well at Work, a University Health Services program at UC Berkeley.Moskowitz, who has conducted research on disease prevention programs and policies for more than 30 years, says that with the influx of smartphones has come hundreds of thousands of cell towers. These towers receive and transmit radio frequencies called microwaves — the same waves used in microwave ovens.In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic to humans,